Telberg, Val. Val Telberg. April 11- July 3, 1983.

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1983. Introduction by Van Deren Coke. Exhibition catalog, 56 pages with 40 examples of Telberg's photomontages and biographical information. Wraps, fine.

Note: On February 14, 1910, in Moscow, Russia, Vladimir “Val” Telberg was born. For political reasons, the Telbergs moved to China after the Russian Revolution, where Telberg got a scholarship in 1928 to attend Wittenberg College in Ohio for four years, after which he returned to China.  Unrest in the 1930s led the family to resettle in the New York area.  Telberg began taking classes in painting at the Art Students League.  An odd job developing film for night club camera women got him more interested in photography.  Influenced by motion picture film dissolves, he began making photomontages.  He became known for dreamlike photographs from multiple negatives of the human figure. Edward Steichen, Director of Photography at MoMA, began acquiring his work and exhibited Telberg in In and Out of Focus (1948), Photographs by 51 Photographers (1950), and The Sense of Abstraction (1960).  After his father’s death in 1954, Telberg, who by that time was married with two children, had to take over the family’s mail order book business.  He gave up artwork until the late 1970s at his home in Sag Harbor, where he died in 1995.  In addition to the catalog for his 1983 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Telberg can be found in other photography publications, including The Multiple Image (1972).